January NonRequired Reading List
Contemplify / NRR #107
“I like grit. I like love and death. I am tired of irony.”
— Jim Harrison
My family met the New Year up on the third coast of the snowsoaked north. On the eve of the New Year the kids bullishly lobbied to stay up until midnight. The adults were less enthused by this prospect, each angling for an opportunity to slip out of sight and flop their weary heads onto a pillow. Outside the wind ripped through the trees causing a common Midwestern commotion, is that new snow falling or the old being dusted up? Each passing hour an adult snuck away into bed. Myself included. Tucked up in bed with a book on my lap I was not staying up to midnight. Even with their excitement I would have bet my last sawbuck that my youngest would fall into sleep before ten. The New Year rattled the windows and the urge to meet the future facing mug of Janus was undeniable for my sleepyeyed seven-year-old. I did the impossible. Rolling out of bed, I added a layer of clothes and grumpily went back downstairs to meet the challenge. The slogging final hours snickered in their lazy passing. At five minutes to midnight, we pulled on snowpants, winter coats, hats, gloves and laced reluctant snow boots. A rush of fierce northern wind slapped us as we opened the door and ran to the shores of the great lake of Michigan. My daughter counted down from ten multiple times (her watch does not have a second hand) until we reached midnight. We shouted Happy New Year! across the lake along with our wishes for this newborn year. The chill caught up to us and we hustled back to the house, my daughter continuing her shouts ensuring that those in the house would be startled awake to this birthing year. A quick celebratory cookie before weak attempts at brushing teeth before we all finally crawled into bed.
What got me out of bed was not obligation to my two little gnomes, but my hellbent commitment to marking transitions;1 liturgical calendars (traditional or my own), solstices and equinoxes, full moons and new moons, candles burned to nubs and the untidy Gregorian calendar. New Year resolutions are a frozen soup that I heat up on occasion, but I do not long for them. There are plenty of openings throughout linear gates that give rise to reflection and new beginnings. Maya Angelou winks, “This is a wonderful day. I’ve never seen this one before.” The centenarian Br. David Steindl-Rast writes that “time is a sequence of ever-new opportunities flowing toward us–a series of presents that are given to us in the present moment, the now, the “fullness of time.”2 This is how I wish to meet each day, as a birthing of blank hours that extend a hand to the dance. Clocks betray the blank present moment, always chopping and charting. Before my unmet pal Jim Harrison slipped to the other side of the grave, he wrote, “I hope to define my life, whatever is left, by migrations, south and north with the birds and far from the metallic fever of clocks, the self staring at the clock saying, ‘I must do this.”3
Time is a fevered crook with a hitchhiker’s thumb. Hitching his way between starts and stops, lemonade stands and graveyards. Time meets up with space to divide us on this corporeal plane marked by the differentiation of bodies, measuring tape, and favored ice cream flavors. Beneath clocked time, there is an eternity. Without beginning, the is of it just is. There are a bunch of goofy names that get snapped to the unmanifested and uncreated. Pick your favorite and see if it sticks. I prefer “Godhead” as a nod to Meister Eckhart and his metaphysical play. An empty bowl that boils over. Relationality emerges, a dance of creation unfurls out of this port of entry. Life happens and then life precedes more life. The spark of Divinity is precedently carried like a folded newspaper underarm, hidden yet readable. Or you could say that the Divine is pressed like a seed within us at birth. Our incarnate lives, in body and spirit (one, not two) nurture this seed as this seed nurtures us. Waking up to this seed within us is a marvelous day on this plane of time. We say, hello in there and get a response back, look and see. The seed is eternal and expectant, impossibly patient to sprout. Time is a questionable traveller jostling to and fro in conditions beyond control. But attendance to this innate seed brightens awareness to what holy hotshots we become. With this growing awareness we recognize the sprouting seeds in others. For these scattered seeds all share the open secret of their origins. In my mother tongue, we call those infused seeds Christ. We trample space with unknown quantities of time, spilling our personal history out like breadcrumbs from punctured pockets. A shorthair story is expelled, mingling with and across other stories, until it is eventually pecked up by the chickens of history.
We can awaken to the Christ within, eternal and expectant, which further shakes loose more Christ within. The fuller we awaken to this shared mystery, the more our shine is uniquely expressed in our puny existence. Humility is our best bud in relating to the time and space we find ourselves in. A clock only exists in time and space, do not let it rue the day. The fullness of time is without hands, pointing us to the now that drops into eternity and geysers up from empty release.
2025 has passed, but it has arms that reach us. Marking our time and all those we continue to love through life, strife, and death. The dead do not saddle up next to us at the breakfast table in bodily form begging us to chew our oatmeal more quietly, but nor are they gone. Eternity meets us in every inbreaking of presence.
Nothing changed in eternity when my little brood shouted a warm welcome to the New Year on the cold winds crossing the great lake. But we marked our passage through time with a full throated plea for the world, for us, echoing our desert ancestors, “God, we beseech Thee, make us fully alive!”
Contemplify is ten years old in 2026. It is a gift to create and share freely this past decade. Each offering of Contemplify is free to engage in (podcasts, NonRequired Readings, Lo-Fi & Hushed Contemplative Practices), but like all worthwhile endeavors it takes time, grit, and energy. Some folks have sought to support Contemplify through monetary means. It is a kindness that I am learning to receive as it softens the unnecessary friction to do this joyful work. Those who become paid subscribers are automatically invited to join the weekly Lo-Fi & Hushed Practice Session on Wednesday mornings. A regular communal contemplative practice that supports the rhythms of your one wild and precious life. You can practice live with me and a top shelf community of practitioners or with the recording. Rhythmic contemplative goodness. If you want to join th the Lo-Fi & Hushed Practice Sessions but don’t want to (or cannot) become a paid subscriber—no sweat—just add your name and email to this form and you will be included in the practice for free. Money should never be a barrier to contemplative practice. Practice makes practice. Always delighted to add more practitioners to the circle. Hope to see you there.4
Again, big thanks to all who are quietly supporting this contemplative work over this past decade.
January NonRequired Reading List
The Contemplative Leader: Uncover the Power of Presence and Connection by Patrick Boland (Get it at the Public Library or Bookshop)
Certain books jump the fence of categorization. I understand the need to get marked and sorted a particular way by a marketer at publishing house to get pushed into simple categories. But I was flummoxed when The Contemplative Leader was signaled as “business” book. The argument is there, but is could just as easily wear the badge of spirituality, psychology, philosophy, transformative leadership, and more. Patrick Boland has written a book that denies easy categorization.
The Contemplative Leader invites readers into self-awareness on a contemplative path. Leadership is the presenting framework that Boland uses to draw readers to look at the flourishing of their lives through a contemplative lens; examining and reflecting on the formative narratives driving us, the interior selves that propel and confound us, and an unflinching graced wholeness as the invitational path for ourselves and for the lives we touch. “We can only lead others as far as we have first gone ourselves.”5 Boland offers a staged reflective and engaged contemplative praxis across the text to help leaders of every stripe authentically grow. This is guidebook for servant leadership whether you run a boardroom or throw darts in the barroom (you can hear my conversation with Patrick Boland here).
The Contemplative Leader is for contemplatives seeking a thoughtful pathway of understanding, narrative examples, and thorough praxis for blossoming.
Give Me a Word: The Promise of an Ancient Practice to Guide Your Year by Christine Valters Paintner (Get it at the Public Library or Bookshop)
What can a word do for you? Have you ever had a ‘word’ brightly given to you? In my life there have been words, ‘abide’ and ‘desert’ come most readily to mind, where the bottom drops out and I fall into the oceanic depths of its meaning. Christine Valters Painter’s Give Me a Word is book that curates a steady practice with unfolding steps for a word to stoke your days.
Give Me a Word slows you down to listen to what is emerging in the soft voice of mystery. It is a patient book that calls you to “pay attention to synchronicities around you.”6 This cultivation of attention is at the core of contemplation. Not just in moments of goosebump elation, but as Painter encourages, “remember that a word that creates a sense of inner resistance is as important to pay attention to as one that has a great deal of resonance.”7 Drawing on the examples of the Christian desert tradition, Give Me a Word emphasizes the notorious and life-changing radicality of a ‘word’.
Give Me a Word is for contemplative readers seeking a practice, simple in nature with longstanding fruit.
Devouring Time: Jim Harrison, a Writer’s Life by Todd Goddard (Get it at the Public Library or Bookshop)
Jim Harrison is an icon in my life. His picture hangs above my desk as both a reminder and call, to live this life as vividly as possible (the curious can hear on Contemplify’s latest musing how Harrison’s birthday is the start of my personal non-liturgical liturgical year). I inhaled Devouring Time from start to finish, the superb and clear writing is concomitant to the arc of Harrison’s writing life as a poet, novelist, sceenwriter, journalist, and poet (listed twice because that is how important poetry was to Jim). Todd Goddard has set a high water mark for future biographers on the life of a writer.
In covering the writing life of Jim Harrison, Devouring Time staked the ground twice. The first stake is on necessary (and unnecessary) costs of a writer putting their art at the center of their life, and the second, the arduous development of craft. Imagining a string tied to each stake, no matter the direction a story turned it would eventually reel back and wrap around one of these stakes. The ground is the grief of loss. When asked what first sparked his interest in literature “Jim replied half seriously that it mostly came during the hormonal frenzy of fourteen when he was reading good literature and wanted to use poetry to woo girls, but he also recalled how a farmer had once committed suicide and hadn’t left a note for his wife and kids. When Jim asked his father why not, Winfield explained that the man did not have the language. Jim remembered thinking how he wanted always to have the language.”8 Harrison set out and achieved to have the language that the grittiness of life demanded. His readers were rewarded for his toiling over love and loss and the grief that follows.
Devouring Time is for Jim Harrison readers or hungry-for-life writers.
Contemplify Update
Season Six is fully out and about town, with a few bonus musings dropped off in the last month. I hope it met your ears. In the winter, I move into a season of deep reading and preparing season seven (with a few more musings before then I am sure). As always you can find the complete list of Contemplify episodes here and below are the three most recent bonus episodes.
The Famous One (Season 6, Ep 13 - Bonus)
Remembering Lerita Coleman Brown on Waiting for a Word in the Heart [Repost from 2023] (Season 6, Ep 12 - Bonus Repost)
Stay Outside (or Non-Liturgical Liturgical Calendar Musing) (Season 6, Ep 11 - Bonus)
All episodes are available from Contemplify through Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get podcasts worth their salt.
Arts & Articles
JOSHUA BURNSIDE (Orinoco Books): This sweetly sung in-bookstore concert by Joshua Burnside and pals is slow sipping Irish folk music. Worthy of repeat, with a new album coming in March. (h/t to Downtown)
NO ZAZEN FOR THE BIRTHDAY GIRL (Constant Craving) by Alexandra Cain: This essay reflects on the challenges of practice in motherhood, lineages, and liberation. Grateful for this wise insight from a fellow householder. (h/t to the Abbot)
BLACK CONTEMPLATIVE PRAYER VIRTUAL PRAYER SUMMIT (blackcontemplativesummit.com) in partnership with Awakenings, Inc: A repeat post for this forthcoming summit: “Join us for the Second Black Contemplative Prayer Virtual Summit, a gathering of Black spiritual teachers and thought leaders who will guide us into deeper waters of contemplative prayer and practice. This summit is designed for everyone, led by Black voices, and dedicated to deepening the well of contemplative wisdom within community. Building on the foundation of the inaugural summit, this year turns inward and downward, into the rich wisdom of Black contemplative voices and focuses on healing, wholeness, and cultivating inner sanctuary for ourselves and our communities.”
Pressed like a seed
in incarnate lives,
say hello in there
to the eternal
and expectant.
Across the lake,
Paul
All Bookshop purchase links give a kickback to a local New Mexico bookstore and to Contemplify. Big thanks.
But I do want to encourage that in my young pups.
Steindl-Rast, David. You Are Here: Keywords for Life Explorers. New York: Orbis Books, 2023, 146.
Todd Goddard. Devouring Time: Jim Harrison, a Writer’s Life (Ashland, OR: Blackstone Publishing, 2025).
Contemplify never wants filthy lucre to be a barrier to practice. So if you want to practice weekly with this contemplative basecamp at Lo-Fi & Hushed but aren’t able to offer support (no sweat!), drop your name and email here, I will add you to the next practice. We would be thrilled to have you practicing with us.
Boland, Patrick. The Contemplative Leader: Uncover the Power of Presence and Connection. (BenBella Books, 2024), 146.
Painter, Christine Valters. Give Me a Word: The Promise of an Ancient Practice to Guide Your Year (Minneapolis, MN: Broadleaf Books, 2025), 20.
Ibid, p. 21.
Todd Goddard. Devouring Time: Jim Harrison, a Writer’s Life (Ashland, OR: Blackstone Publishing, 2025), 375.